Reels

Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 On a warm night in 2007, LaSalle Street belonged to a film crew and a very large truck. The canyon of banks and office towers had been closed, lit, and dressed as downtown Gotham. Thousands of Chicagoans watched from windows and sidewalks … Read more

Photo: Presidencia de la República Mexicana / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 Inside a hangar built for airships, a hotel hallway began to rotate. The hangar stood at Cardington in Bedfordshire, England, in sheds raised a century ago for giants of the sky. Christopher Nolan had brought his company there in the summer of 2009 … Read more

Photo: Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 On a cold December night in 2005, New York City welcomed home its most famous monster. The world premiere of King Kong had taken over a Manhattan theatre on December 5. Crowds pressed against the barriers outside, stamping their feet against the winter cold. Inside, … Read more

Photo: gdcgraphics / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 On the morning of Saturday, May 4, 2002, the telephone lines at Columbia Pictures began carrying impossible numbers. The studio’s new comic-book movie had opened the day before in 3,615 American theaters. By Saturday night, that single day had produced roughly 43.6 million dollars at the box … Read more

Photo: Dr.Haus / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 On the afternoon of November 4, 2001, Leicester Square in London stopped belonging to ordinary cinema. The Odeon, the square’s grand old picture palace, had been dressed for a school that did not exist. Crowds pressed behind the barriers in homemade robes, pointed hats and scarves of … Read more

Photo: Harald Krichel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 In March of 2004, a film crew stood on a glacier in Iceland and listened to the wind argue with them. The glacier was Svínafellsjökull, a slow river of ice sliding off the great Vatnajökull ice cap. Winds on the location reportedly reached seventy-five miles per … Read more

Photo: Wolfgang Wander / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 On the coldest morning of the year, Joel Barish woke up already tired of his own life. Nothing in his small apartment explained the heaviness sitting behind his eyes. His car outside wore a fresh dent that he could not remember receiving. He called in sick … Read more

Photo: U.S. Department of State / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain The boats came back to Monuriki before dawn, carrying a film crew that had not worked together for a year. The little Fijian island looked exactly as they had left it, green and empty and ringed with white sand. Nothing on the island had changed, … Read more

Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 In 1994, a film director in California sat down and wrote the future. The document ran to eighty pages, and it described a moon that did not exist. On that moon stood forests that glowed after dark and mountains that floated in the sky. Its people … Read more

Photo: Raffi Asdourian / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 On the morning of Friday, January 9, 2009, the American box office belonged to a seventy-eight-year-old man. His film had no explosions, no franchise, no sequel waiting breathlessly in the wings behind it. It cost roughly thirty-three million dollars, a rounding error beside the superhero budgets … Read more